IConference 2008 Wildcard: Questions to Address

From Design Education in iSchools

There are various questions that we believe this Wildcard Session will allow us to explore. We do not expect to cover all of them exhaustively, and to a large extent, we are leaving it open to you to decide which ones you want to concentrate on.

Please vote for questions which you find interesting by adding your initials to the end of the line on which they appear. Feel free to vote for as many or as few as you desire.

Please also feel free to add questions you would like us to address, but do not see on these lists.

Also, as part of stimulating the brainstorming exercises, we will be creating and distributing notecards. Suggest content for notecards which will be distributed here.

Contents 1 General Motivating Themes 2 Specific Questions 3 References 3.1 1 4 Related Links 4.1 iConference 2008 Wildcard Links

General Motivating Themes

• What make design activities from an Information Science perspective unique? How can we communicate and demonstrate this to our students?

• How can we better integrate the (often) observational research done in fields such as Information Behavior, the Ethnography side of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Organizational Studies more explicitly into our design activities? What kinds of hands-on activities can we develop for the classroom so that it becomes second-nature for our students to approach design from this perspective?

• How can we better harness perspectives on design from many different disciplines, including but not limited to Architecture, Urban Planning, Industrial Engineering, Art, and Computer Science? How can we recruit students from these different disciplines into our classes so that we create a multidisciplinary experience in our classes?

Specific Questions

• What is design? Where does design intersect iSchool curricula?
• What are the methods of design which are meaningful and useful in iSchool education?
• What does a class devoted to design look like?
• Who participates in design? Who can do design?
• Where does design happen? Where doesn't design happen (and it could)?
• What are the particular design concepts we are trying to teach?
• What are barriers to teaching design? How can we overcome those obstacles?
• Is there an iSchool way of teaching design? How is that different from other disciplines?
• Are we (or should we be) teaching design or design thinking? Is there a difference?
• How does the iSchool perspective on design compare with the growing discussion of Computational Thinking (#1)?
• How do we teach design across many contexts, to students from many backgrounds?
• What are the contexts of design in iSchools? Where is "design" currently applied? Where is it not?

References

1

Wing, J.M. (2005) Computational Thinking CACM, 49(3) 33-35.

Related Links

• Design Education in iSchools Home Page
• Design Methods
• Collaborative Design Bibliography
• Persistent Conversation on Design Education
  • Anecdotes, Experiences, and Case Studies of Teaching Design
  • Problems Teaching Design
• Sign up to participate
  • Design-Ed - Visit and join our Google Group to participate in both topical and planning discussions

iConference 2008 Wildcard Links

• iConference 2008 Wildcard home page.
• Overview of the iConference 2008 Wildcard Session
  • Click here to see the tentative schedule
• Identify particular questions of interest, or suggest new questions you would like us to address in the iConference 2008 Wildcard Session.
  • Suggest content for notecards which will be distributed
• Vote on Rapid Brainstorming Techniques to be used in the iConference 2008 Wildcard Session
• Original iConference 2008 Wildcard Proposal